Edifying Debate

Monday, May 8, 2017

FINAL DECLARATION BY THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR FOR PEACE AND THE ABOLITION OF FOREIGN MILITARY BASES, Guantánamo, Cuba, Saturday, May 6, 2017.

Translated from Spanish to English by Google Translate & Rhone Fraser, Ph.D.

The Fifth International Seminar For Peace and the
Abolition of Foreign Military Bases was held May 4th to 6th 2017 in Guantánamo,
the easternmost Cuban province and the first anti-imperialist trench in America
to have a part of its territory illegally occupied by a foreign military base
against the will of its people.

This new edition of the Seminar had a total of 217 participants from 32
countries, including leaders of the World Peace Council (CMP) and its member
organizations, as well as personalities, peace fighters, anti-war supporters
and friends of solidarity. Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Comoros, Cuba, El Salvador,
Guinea Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Republic of
Korea, Kiribati, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Puerto Rico, SADR,
Dominican Republic, Seychelles, Switzerland and Venezuela.

Participants noted that the event took place in the context of a complex
international situation characterized essentially by the persistence of the
aggressiveness of US imperialism and its NATO allies trying to reconfigure a
new world map commensurate with their geopolitical and geostrategic
interests.These interests increase
their interference in nations of all continents and oppression of their
peoples.

To achieve these denounced objectives of intervention, domination and blackmail
against the peoples of the world, imperialism relies on a set of tools among which
stands out the proliferation of bases and military installations in many
countries of the planet.

In essence, the United States is the country with the largest number of military
bases in the world, followed by its imperialist NATO partners, and it has the
largest nuclear arsenal in the history of mankind.

The persistence of the acute economic crisis of capitalism, which, among its
most negative effects, has added to the misery, hunger, poverty and
inequalities in the nations of the so-called Third World.

Interference wars have affected the stability of several countries in the
Middle East and Africa, as a consequence of massive and disorderly migratory
phenomena that have caused the death of a large number of immigrants seeking
refuge in European nations. In general we reject them.

The presence of a new Republican Administration in Washington, which has
generated innumerable questions, criticism and great skepticism, and whose most
recent military actions sound the drums of a war of great consequences for humanity.In
Latin America and the Caribbean, imperialism and its lackeys in charge of the
national oligarchies of several countries are attempting to reverse the process
of progressive change initiated by leftist forces more than a decade ago and
seek to re-establish neoliberal policies that advance
imperialism.

To
this end, the empire and its acolytes appeal to a dirty economic, political and
media war aimed at confusing the peoples and destroying the framework of social
achievements reached by progressive governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil,
Argentina, Ecuador and others, where today The future
of the whole region.

In
that context, the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of
Peace approved by the second CELAC Summit held in Havana in January 2014
becomes more effective as the most important political commitment adopted by
all Latin American and Caribbean States.This is reaffirmed in the declarations issued at the fourth summit held
in Quito, Ecuador, in January 2016, and at the fifth summit held in Punta Cana,
Dominican Republic, in January 2017.

Recognizing
the people who are fighting in the world for the Abolition of the Foreign
Military Bases and for the above, this fifth international seminar calls for a
redoubled struggle against aggressive imperialist actions that threaten world
peace.

END OF FINAL DECLARATION.

On
my first full day of the Fifth Seminar for Peace and the Abolition of Foreign
Military Bases in Guantánamo, I am learning a lot. Keep in mind that the
U.S. government still holds and tortures detainees at a military base in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, without charge.

I
am writing a manuscript about the difference between journalists who do not
question U.S. imperialism, whom I call industry journalists, and journalists
who do question U.S. imperialism, whom I call advocacy journalists.

The
reality of industry journalism and their journalists is present in the fact
that no mainstream U.S. journalists or mainstream U.S. press covered this seminar.Because, ultimately, they do not support the abolition of
U.S. military bases in Guantánamo and across the world.

And
after reading what James Edward Jackson Jr. (1914-2007) wrote in The Worker periodical that he edited, I
gained the most important context to put my experience in at this seminar.This is the context of an advocacy journalist
who is like his advocacy journalist predecessor Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930).

Hopkins celebrated the Haitian revolution in her periodical Colored American Magazine. She describes it as a war of liberation and compares it to the U.S. Civil War for her Black readers. James E.
Jackson celebrated the Cuban revolution in his periodical The Worker and wanted his readers to understand the importance of it.These two political revolutions in the
Caribbean are questioned or insulted by almost every industry journalist in the
United States.

In
the November 6, 1962 edition of the paper he edited, The Worker, also in the book The View From Here, James E. Jackson wrote:

“the
quicker the U.S. government enters into negotiations with the government of
Cuba on the question of the demilitarization of the Guantánamo base
(preliminary to returning it to Cuba whose right to it is an inalienable
privilege of her sovereignty), the sooner the total energies of the people of
Cuba can be turned to the peaceful pursuits of the economic, social and
cultural development of their country.”

Fifty
five years after Jackson’s writing this, the U.S. government has still not
demilitarized Guantánamo Bay and has consequently chose to hinder the
economic, social and cultural development of Cuba.Jackson in this newspaper wrote about another
advocacy journalist for the Baltimore Afro-American, William Worthy, who was prosecuted by the U.S. government for “having sojourned in Cuba
enroute home from abroad.”The
government claimed that Worthy did not have a “valid passport.”

In the August 28, 1962 edition of The Worker, Jackson wrote that “the
injustice in the William Worthy case is all the more outrageous in light of the
fact that during the past two years thousands of so-called refugees have poured
into the United States from Cuba without passports, valid or otherwise, but
none of them have been prosecuted.”Fellow Afro-American writer
Ralph Matthews wrote that “Worthy had the temerity to find something good to
write about in a regime which displeased the money interests of America.”

William
Worthy was one who was defying U.S. imperialism and writing as an advocacy
journalist.

Because
of James E. Jackson, I am.

Because of Pauline Hopkins, I am.

Because
of William Worthy, I am.

I
am learning about the reality of industry journalism and I am learning what the
“humanitarian” intervention that it promotes looks like, especially after listening
to one commenter in the audience on the Seminar’s second day, from what he
called "the Fund for Reconciliation and Development."

This commenter talked
about the lack of feeling involved in the process of writing the declaration following this seminar.The Fund for Reconciliation and Development that he comes from, however, is a project of
the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) who, as Eduardo
Galeano has written in The Open Veins of
Latin America, bans trade of any country with North Vietnam and Cuba.

Not only does USAID come in and prevent trade
with these countries because of their socialist economy, they also force the
governments they work with to pass laws that makes foreign exploitation of a
nation’s land and resources much easier.

This is “humanitarian” intervention.

It is actually imperialist intervention cloaked in "humanitarian"
aid.

It was clear that the organizers of this conference,
MOVPAZ saw the group that I traveled with, CODEPINK, as on the same side of
this Fund and as one that would support “humanitarian” intervention.

This
was striking to me because I do not like to see myself on the side of
imperialism, but as a U.S. citizen in Cuba, I could not help but be seen as on
the side of U.S. imperialism.

Therefore,
I could understand why MOVPAZ would not be eager to heed most suggestions from
my delegation’s leadership who is my activist-mentor, Medea Benjamin.

This
commenter talked about working in Vietnam.This kind of work however is simply passing laws to help foreign U.S.
companies undermine democratic leadership, as the U.S. based National Endowment
for Democracy (NED) is trying to do in Cuba and is tragically doing in Venezuela. The Obama administration approved funds for the NED to continue undermining the gains of their socialist revolution.

I
had a conversation with Baboshe Shango of the National Network on Cuba about
the ways that mainstream U.S. book publishing industry welcomed the story of
Carlos Moore, a dark-skinned Cuban who focused on what he called the anti-Black
racism of the revolutionary society in Cuba.

One of the reasons, Shango
said, that Moore said that Cuba is still dealing with the problem of anti-Black
racism, was because Fidel Castro in a parade waving to a crowd one day, passed him
and did not wave back. This was Moore’s resounding proof of the
existence of anti-Black racism.

This is
actually no proof at all. Cuban historian Esteban Morales has been one of the most articulate voices of the racism in Cuba and still supports the necessary Cuban revolution.

The objective of industry journalism is to discredit the Cuban revolution by emphasizing its racism.

However a close read of the work of Cuban people will reveal that one can still identify the racism in Cuba while working to support the Cuban revolution and its goals. U.S. industry journalism says otherwise however.

Small reasons
like this are the ways that the mainstream will use to say that racism and
sexism are big problems in revolutionary Cuba even though the U.S. mainstream
and U.S. military promotes more racism and sexism than any other government in the world.

Leslie Feinberg has written about this quite eloquently in her book Rainbow Solidarityin Defense of Cubapublished by the
Workers World Party where she writes that "today it is U.S. imperialism that has set up concentration camps--from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo--where anti-gay and anti-trans rape and humiliation are incorporated into the science of torture" (27).

I
noticed a recent Facebook post by my friend Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who pointed
out the practice of pink washing, which is using the social construction of
sexuality to justify imperialism. In the protests I have noticed of
Abdul-Aliy, I can see how the mainstream uses the face of gay, lesbian, cis, and trans
activists or their face to justify imperialist behavior such as denying HIV
meds to populations of color, or making it cost prohibitive.

Or
encouraging a colonial structure where two non profit organizations fight each
other for the same limited funds, using the lives of people of color as fodder
from which to profit more from HIV medication that is sorely needed.

This
kind of disregard for Black lives happened during George Washington's
hesitation to arm Black troops during the so called “Revolutionary War” (or the
war for the U.S. to disregard British abolition) or the Civil War, where
Abraham Lincoln hesitated to arm Black troops until he found it absolutely
necessary.

While
Lincoln was deliberating whether to do so, people of color were dying at the
hands of committed slaveowners. Those who run nonprofits in the twentieth and twenty first centuries sit on life
saving medication, while those who suffer with HIV die.

Carlos
Moore should have carefully weighed his critique of anti-Black racism in his
book expressed the fact that while Cuba does suffer from racism, it does not
compare to the racism exacted by the United States on its citizens of
color.

Obama
made headlines recently for earning $400,000 to speak at the University of
Chicago, but instead of castigating him, which is easy, we should castigate the
imperialists like Penny Pritzker whose money helped “elect” him
president.

Instead
of castigating Obama, we need to castigate the owners of these newspapers, who
helped prop him up and will now set him up to look like the thief when in fact the real
thieves are the industrialists, or the owners of the newspapers like Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post
and Sidney Harman of Newsweek, who approved the mocking November 2016 cover of
Newsweek after Obama's announcement to normalize relations with Cuba that says
mockingly “viva el capitalismo” with the face of Che Guevara who would
absolutely NOT approve of the way his image is being used to support
capitalism.

This racist and imperialist propaganda is more dangerous and
sinister than Obama making $400,000 on one speech. Industry journalism
usually supports sinister behavior by industrialists.

We
have to remember who the real enemies are. Malcolm X said in 1964 that if
we are not careful about the propaganda we receive, we will end up hating the
ones being oppressed and loving the ones doing the oppressing.

I
am noticing how Medea Benjamin who is a role model to me is pushing for more
aggressive actions against the U.S. military base in Guantánamo which occupies
about 71 square miles around Guantánamo bay.

Medea
suggested a flotilla and a protest on the base, yet noticed that the organizers
of this seminar declined her suggestions. She said she knew that the
organizers would decline her suggestions because they are very careful not to
provoke any military action from the U.S. Marine military presence that has
notoriously murdered Cuban people in their own waters in years past.

One
of the teachers who I met in my first trip to Guantánamo in November 2015 I saw
a second time on this trip and he told me about a Cuban fisherman whom the U.S.
Marines shot and killed.

I
am also aware that it is up to us, as U.S. citizens, or estadounidenses, to let the Cubans lead
their own struggle and not to take over their struggle as our U.S. presence,
even as antiwar activists are wont to do.

I
am glad I ran into an ELAM (escuela latinoamerica de medica) student that I met
in February 2015. Between him and a Sierra Leonean that I met at Dulles
Airport who told me he knows the work of Chernoh Alpha Bah,another advocacy journalist, I promised to have a discussion with this student about Chernoh Bah’s important book Ebola Outbreak in West Africa.

This book isabout the
profit motive of U.S. pharmaceutical companies in Africa, as opposed to the
motive of Cuban doctors in Africa and the entire world. This reminded me that the movement to end neocolonialism is on its way.

Also at this seminar was the historic screening of the film All Guantánamo Is Ours by Hernando Calvino Ospina and the review of
it by Javier Salado Villacin.

I saw
something in this film the second time that I did not see the first time, and
that was the film’s interview with Rody Rodriguez who said that he was not a
revolutionary but he had many revolutionary friends.One day he heard someone shout in Spanish the
word “worm!”This reminded me of the
main character in Elias Miguel Muñoz’s novel The Greatest Performance where the main character’s family are
called worms because they flee Cuba after the revolution.

This
novel has THE BEST read of the type of gay men I have met in my life who desire
and attract sugar daddies and then complain later about how the sugar daddies
“ruined” their life, when in each moment they chose to be with them.

In the Cuban revolution, the Cubans were rejecting the sugar daddy of Spain then the United States, whose mafia ran the casinos. Before the revolution. However, after the revolution, the relationship with the sugar daddy had to end.

Ruby Dee said we shouldn't get mad at Cuba or Castro because they love their people and didn't want to see it run by these mafia.

From our tour guide from Amistur Cuba, I learned about the Santería orishas, including Babalu Aye, who is in
charge of healing. I also had casual conversations with a Cuban woman who had flowers
that she said were for the La Virgen de la Caridad, and that she is
Catholic.I see immediately the
importance of Catholicism in the lives of Cubans and also how Catholicism was a
vehicle for the practice of Yoruba in the tradition of Santería.

The
first talk on the second day of the Seminar that I remembered was by Bassel
Ismael Salem.He gave a presentation
called “The Zionist Entity ‘State of Israel’ Military Base of Imperialism and
Zionism in Palestine.”He explained how
the base at Guantánamo was aiding Zionism in Palestine, because it started
torturing detainees there in 2002, after the September 11th attack on the World
Trade Center.

He
mentioned three models of colonization and and how Israel is an economic power
and an ideological project involved in savage capitalism.Salem said that the Zionists are the biggest
threat to world peace and that we must put an end to these three models of
colonization.

Ricardo
Sanna then gave a presentation on the Italian Military occupation of Sardinia
that reminded me of what George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye about the U.S. and English support of Benito
Mussolini in his socialist beginnings that quickly turned totalitarian.

There
was a presentation on Okinawa and the U.S. military base there.When they occupied, they placed Japanese in
concentration camps.This reminded me of
the play I produced and directed in 2012 called Dirty Hearts written by Sonia Sanchez that featured a Japanese
maiden, Shigeko, who represented a character with a higher social status than
that of the U.S. Black capitalist, represented by her character Carl.

Sanchez presents Carl as a tragic figure who,
as long as he believes in the fairness of the U.S. economy, will routinely be
trumped by white capitalists and Japanese maidens like Shigeko who, like the bourgeoisie before the revolution, depend on their European sugar daddies.

I am forever grateful to the energy and
generosity of the actress Yokko who portrayed Shigeko unforgettably in the
production I produced and directed.

The
presence of U.S. military bases leaves people of color including the Cubans and
the Japanese in a similar position and the removal of the bases require our
unity.Tony Martin in Race First wrote about Japanese sailors
shipping Marcus Garvey’s Negro World newspaper
to Japan and Yuri Kochiyama was a strong supporter of the work of Malcolm X in
his final year.

We need this
collaboration to remove the military presence of the U.S. from the globe.

Ian
Hansen, a professor at York College, gave an unforgettable talk about how the
history of the American Psychological Association’s support of the “enhanced
interrogation” program by the U.S. government inside the Guantánamo
prison.

He said that 779 men have been
imprisoned since January 11, 2002 and that there are 41 men from 13 countries
are in the prison including three convicted and 7 charged, but there is no
trial for any of these detainees.Five
have been cleared for release by the Obama administration, but Obama did not
release them before he left office.Nine
died in prison, including 3 classified suspiciously as suicides.Hansen said that two things allowed the U.S.
government to torture inside their military base in Guantánamo with impunity:
one, a legal protection for those who torture, and two, a public perception
that the torture is designed to obtain life saving information.

This
reminded me of what Paula Giddings wrote about how advocacy journalist Ida B.
Wells's campaign against lynching included shaming the nineteenth century
mainstream press by informing the mainstream press in England about the
practice of torture.

This
is what advocacy journalist Robert F. Williams did with “the Kissing Case” when
the Monroe, North Carolina, Klan-friendly local police jailed a young eight
year old Black boy for kissing a white girl.Williams informed the mainstream presses in Europe. Because of their
coverage, the Jim Crow Monroe police were forced to release this eight
year old boy.

Hansen
identified the individuals who designed this “enhanced interrogation” program
of torture as James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen.

This was leaked to the public because of a reporter Scott Gerwehr who
talked to Brad Olsen of Psychologists of Social Responsibility.

I
also wondered if this group would consider or have considered any helpful
collaboration with the Association of Black Psychologists. I fear that Hansen’s
organization would simply be hostile to the paradigms of the U.S. based
Association of Black Psychologists.

I learned that the U.S. government denied the Association of Black Psychologists to hold their recent conference in Cuba, and this reminded me of the government persecution of advocacy journalist William Worthy who was detained for reporting on the successes of the Cuban revolution.

Like Thomas Jefferson's racist embargo on Haiti, the U.S. government's racist embargo on Cuba is still trying to control and censor the conversations between people of color in countries with two different economies.

Hansen
said that the American Psychological Association removed the distinction
between what is allowed and what is ethical.Stephen Behnhke undermined, neutralized resistance within this professional against
professionals who opposed the use of their training for torture of detainees
held without charge in a foreign prison.

On
the last day of this visit, we traveled by bus to Caimanera, going to the
Caimanera Hotel. We were able to see the
border that the U.S. Marines set up on the Southern region of the Guantánamo
Bay.

I
asked the question about why the Cuban revolution was not able to
claim this base indefinitely since the revolution that started in 1959.

This question was
answered by the interview Medea had with a local youth leader Olga and a
local historian Joaquín Toirac Adamos at the Caimanera Hotel.

He
said that Castro planned to expel the U.S. Marines from Guantánamo by cutting
off the water supply of the entire bay in 1962.He warned the civilians around the bay to leave the area because he was
cutting off the water supply.

However,
as Adamos said, the U.S. Marines were able to get their water supply from the
neocolonial leadership of the closest island of Jamaica.

I was disappointed to learn this, because I
was hoping that Jamaicans would have cooperated with the Cuban revolution.

Not only did the U.S. Marines get freshwater
from neocolonial Jamaica to support their military base during the Cuban
revolution, they also gave guns and money to the Jamaica Labour Party to, as
James E. Jackson said “bully the…nation…into submission to Washington—Wall
Street’s Will” (The Worker, 7/23/61).

Unfortunately Jamaica since its so called
“independence” in 1962, has been bullied into submission into Washington--Wall Street's Will.

In 1983 Fidel
Castro said at the Conference on the External Debt of Latin America and the
Caribbean:

“how could a government, and a country, which has to go every month
to discuss with the International Monetary Fund what it must do at home, be
called independent?This is a
make-believe independence, and we see this as a struggle for national
liberation, which can truly bring together, for the first time in the history
of our hemisphere, all the social strata in a struggle to attain their true
independence.”

According to this 1983
speech, Jamaica has a “make-believe independence” and is still missing a
struggle for national liberation, namely because it includes the maroon nation
which, unlike Cuba, seems unwilling to cooperate with a national government and
has historically been unwilling to cooperate with a colonial or neocolonial
government.This was evidenced by the
support Jamaica gave to the military naval base in 1962.

Following
this interview with Joaquín, I was interviewed by a journalist from Radio
Caimanera about my role and her photographer who identified me from our
previous visit.Town Square, my
delegation and the other delegations from other organizations joined for the
reading of a declaration from this conference.At this reading, I reunited with two teachers from Caimanera who I met
on my first trip to Caimanera in 2015. One of these teachers gave me a history of Cuba, which I will read and always cherish:

Although
I was disappointed with the role of Jamaica in supporting the U.S. military
base in Guantánamo, I was pleased to learn of a cultural center in Guantánamo that
acknowledged the religious beliefs of those in Trinidad, Jamaica, and
Barbados.

On the second day of this
trip, I was very pleased to meet Trinidad native Lennox Yearwood, the lawyer
for Assata Shakur who is somewhere in Cuba.I am glad I was able to tell him THANK YOU for representing Assata so
fiercely and for showing the world how her case was a frameup for her political
beliefs.

One
of the more significant things I learned about was the unity of the Cuban
people.Their common practice of
Santería I believe played an influential factor in their decisive military
victory at Playa Girón and the larger success of the Cuban revolution.

And their common understanding of capitalism
and socialism and the urgency of maintaining the goals of their socialist
economy which is to provide for them free healthcare and free education.

I believe in that and as I have written for The Advocate in Spring 2015, we must
defend the gains of the revolution, and make sure that our work is not being
used to justify industry journalism which justifies continued imperialism that
the U.S. naval base symbolizes.

We must
learn how to use our privilege as U.S. citizens, like the anti Vietnam war movement
did, and do everything possible to close the Guantánamo prison!Andrew Cornell wrote in his history of the
Movement For A New Society (MNS) that in order to protest the Vietnam war, the
Quaker founded group MNS blocked the USS Nitro ship from loading munitions
bound for the Gulf of Tonkin (27).

An
International Longshoreman Workers’ Union member suggested to me that a similar
movement can be done to close Guantánamo. And I have to join this movement,
especially after I learned that Fidel Castro played an instrumental role in
freeing 1950 Smith Act detainee Henry Winston.¡Sí se puede! -RF.

WORD:

"Let all things be done unto edification." I Corinthians 14:26.

WORD:

"Therefore I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me to edification, and not to destruction." II Corinthians 13:10.

About Me

is an independent writer and journalist born
of Jamaican immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, on October 12, 1979. He
moved to Florida in 1989 and graduated from Zephyrhills (FL) High School
in 1997. He graduated from Yale University in 2001, after which time he
taught in the public school systems in New Haven (CT) and the Bronx for
three years. He then began writing independently and finished a
documentary play on the life of Fannie Lou Hamer entitled, "Living
Sacrifice," for which he still seeks publication. He earned his Ph.D. in African American
Studies from Temple as of August 31, 2012. His dissertation was a literary and historical analysis of Pauline Hopkins, A. Philip Randolph and Paul Robeson. He also is a freelance editor and radio producer, and is currently producer of WPEB's Freedom Readers on 88.1 FM in Philadelphia.